ABSTRACT
A very important segment, and perhaps one of the most interesting and distinctive in the Spanish-speaking world, is the voiceless dental fricative /s̪/, not only in modern phonetic and phonological frameworks, but also in the field of historical linguistics. This chapter describes and analyzes the acoustic nature of the realizations of /s̪/ in the Spanish of Ponce, Puerto Rico. It contests the idea that the only transformations are aspiration and elision with compensatory lengthening or change of vowel quality, by reporting a glottal stop realization of /s̪/. A total of nine native speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish were interviewed and recorded: five males and four females of middle/upper-middle class, three of which were in their late teens/twenties, four in their forties/fifties, and two in the seventies range, all from the city of Ponce. The chapter demonstrates, as postulated by Moraic Theory, that compensatory lengthening is obligatory in cases of elision due to the fact that Spanish codas are moraic.
